The present invention relates to electronic cameras, and more particularly to an integrated image sensor array therein.
Electronic cameras are known in the art. These cameras, in contrast to traditional xe2x80x98analogxe2x80x99 cameras that capture images on film, capture an image in electronic form. Electronic cameras typically contain some type of image detector such as a charge-coupled device (CCD) for converting light into an electrical signal. This electrical signal may then be converted to a plurality of digital signals or bits that are stored in a line memory. An external address controller is then used to access this line memory. One type of such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,343,243 to Maeda, which is hereby incorporated by reference. This system has several limitations, one of which is that since a CCD is not random-accessible, but rather sequentially-accessible, a line buffer is required to buffer the CCD""s output data when operating in color mode. This line buffer is then accessed using an address controller.
Other representative electronic cameras use a linear array that is physically moved with respect to a lens. Such a system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,571,638 to Schneider et al., and which is hereby incorporated by reference. In this type of system, an address counter is used in conjunction with a window detector to indicate the location of the sensor.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved electronic camera.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an improved integrated circuit for sensing images.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide an image sensor and address controller combination as part of a single integrated circuit device.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide electrical circuitry that includes a combined image sensor and address controller.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide high-level data from an image sensor device to a controller.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide data directly from an image sensor integrated circuit to a color processor.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an image sensor integrated circuit having built-in error detection and correction.
The present invention incorporates an address controller with an image sensor array into a single integrated circuit (IC) device. By putting both functions on one IC, fewer pins are needed and less external circuitry is required. The address controller functions described herein also allow for several addressing modes which are not supported by current cameras (analog or digital). This integrated controller not only allows addressing the sensor array in a raster scan, but it also allows other addressing modes including region addressing (by which one could implement pan and tilt functions) and block addressing (useful for block based compression methods like JPEG, MPEG or H.261). Thus, this sensor and address controller combination provides data in the format required for higher level functions, as opposed to forcing the user to convert raster scan to an appropriate format using complicated external circuitry. The address controller embedded on the image sensor chip provides row and column addresses to access desired pixels within the array. This improved image sensor integrated circuit also has built-in error detection and correction, thus providing improved and more efficient data handling capabilities.